Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rosciszewski, P., Krzywaniak, A., Iserte, S., Rojek, K., Gepner, P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00462
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911638408396800
author Rosciszewski, P.
Krzywaniak, A.
Iserte, S.
Rojek, K.
Gepner, P.
author_facet Rosciszewski, P.
Krzywaniak, A.
Iserte, S.
Rojek, K.
Gepner, P.
contents Intelligence Processing Units (IPU) have proven useful for many AI applications. In this paper, we evaluate them within the emerging field of \emph{AI for simulation}, where traditional numerical simulations are supported by artificial intelligence approaches. We focus specifically on a program for training machine learning models supporting a \emph{computational fluid dynamics} application. We use custom TensorFlow provided by the Poplar SDK to adapt the program for the IPU-POD16 platform and investigate its ease of use and performance scalability. Training a model on data from OpenFOAM simulations allows us to get accurate simulation state predictions in test time. We show how to utilize the \emph{popdist} library to overcome a performance bottleneck in feeding training data to the IPU on the host side, achieving up to 34\% speedup. Due to communication overheads, using data parallelism to utilize two IPUs instead of one does not improve the throughput. However, once the intra-IPU costs have been paid, the hardware capabilities for inter-IPU communication allow for good scalability. Increasing the number of IPUs from 2 to 16 improves the throughput from 560.8 to 2805.8 samples/s.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptation of AI-accelerated CFD Simulations to the IPU platform
Rosciszewski, P.
Krzywaniak, A.
Iserte, S.
Rojek, K.
Gepner, P.
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Intelligence Processing Units (IPU) have proven useful for many AI applications. In this paper, we evaluate them within the emerging field of \emph{AI for simulation}, where traditional numerical simulations are supported by artificial intelligence approaches. We focus specifically on a program for training machine learning models supporting a \emph{computational fluid dynamics} application. We use custom TensorFlow provided by the Poplar SDK to adapt the program for the IPU-POD16 platform and investigate its ease of use and performance scalability. Training a model on data from OpenFOAM simulations allows us to get accurate simulation state predictions in test time. We show how to utilize the \emph{popdist} library to overcome a performance bottleneck in feeding training data to the IPU on the host side, achieving up to 34\% speedup. Due to communication overheads, using data parallelism to utilize two IPUs instead of one does not improve the throughput. However, once the intra-IPU costs have been paid, the hardware capabilities for inter-IPU communication allow for good scalability. Increasing the number of IPUs from 2 to 16 improves the throughput from 560.8 to 2805.8 samples/s.
title Adaptation of AI-accelerated CFD Simulations to the IPU platform
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00462